A Short History of England, Ireland and Scotland Part 13

Malcolm's mother was the sister of the Earl of Northumberland. So the son of Duncan was half-English; and he became more than half-English when, somewhat later, he married Margaret, sister of his friend and guest, "Edgar the Atheling," last claimant of the Saxon throne, who had taken refuge with him while vainly plotting against William the Conqueror. This was in 1067, the year after the conquest. So at this critical period in English history, the door leading to the South, which had until now been kept bolted and barred, except for hostile bands, was left ajar. A host of Saxon n.o.bles, following their leader, Edgar, streamed into Scotland, and soon formed the most powerful element about the throne, bringing new speech, new ways, new customs; in fact, doing at Scone precisely what the Norman {256} n.o.bles were at the same time doing at London, subst.i.tuting a more advanced civilization for an existing one. The manners of the Norman n.o.bles were not more odious to the Saxon n.o.bility in England, than were those of the Saxons to the proud thanes and people in Scotland. Then Malcolm began to bestow large grants of land upon his foreign favorites, accompanied by an almost unlimited authority over their va.s.sals, and feudalism was introduced into the free land. With these changes there gradually formed a dialect, a mingling of the two forms of speech, which became the language of the Court, and of the powerful dwellers in the Lowlands. And so, in succeeding reigns, the process of blending went on, the wave of a changed civilization driving before it the Celtic speech, manners, and habits, into their impregnable fastnesses in the Highlands, there to preserve the national type in proud persistence. Such was the condition for one hundred and fifty years, the Crown in open alliance with aliens, subverting established usages and fastening an exotic feudalism upon the South; while an angry and defiant Celtic people remained unsubdued in the North.

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It was a favorite amus.e.m.e.nt with the Scottish kings to dart across the border into Northumbria, the disputed district, not yet incorporated with England, there to waste and burn as much as they could, and then back again. In one of these forays in 1174, the King, "William the Lion," was captured by a party of English barons. Henry II. of England had just returned from Ireland, where he had established his feudal sovereignty by conquest. Now he saw a chance of accomplis.h.i.+ng the same thing by peaceful methods in Scotland. He named as a price of ransom for the captive King an acknowledgment of his feudal lords.h.i.+p. The terms were accepted, and the five castles which they included were surrendered. Fifteen years later, his son Richard I., the romantic crusader, gave back to Scotland her castles and her independence. But what had been done once, would be tried again. So while it was the steady policy of the English sovereigns to reduce Scotland to a state of va.s.salage to England, it was the no less steady aim of the Scottish kings to extend their own feudal authority to the Highlands and the islands in the north and west of their own realm, {258} where an independent people had never yet been brought under its subjection.

In the year 1286 Alexander III. died, and only an infant granddaughter survived to wear the crown. The daughter of the deceased King had married the King of Norway, and dying soon after, had left an infant daughter. It was about this babe that the diplomatic threads immediately began to entwine. A regency of six n.o.bles was appointed to rule the kingdom. Then Edward I. of England proposed a marriage between his own infant son and the little maid. The proposition was accepted. A s.h.i.+p was sent to Norway to bring the baby Queen to Scotland, bearing jewels and gifts from Edward; but just before she reached the Orkneys the "Maid of Norway" died. Edward's plans were frustrated, and the empty throne of Scotland had many claimants, but none with paramount right to the succession. In the wrangle which ensued, when eight ambitious n.o.bles were trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the prize, Edward I. intervened to settle the dispute, which had at last narrowed down to one between two compet.i.tors, Bruce and Baliol, both lineally descended from King David I.

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But the important fact in this mediatorial act of Edward was, that it was done by virtue of his authority as Over-Lord of Scotland. We are left to imagine how and why such a monstrous and baseless pretension was acknowledged without a single protest. But when we reflect that the eager claimants and their upholders represented, not the people of Scotland but an aristocratic ruling element, more than half-English already, it is not so strange that they were willing to pay this price for the sake of restoring peace and security at a time when everything was imperilled by an empty throne. There was no organic unity in Scotland; only a superficial unity, created by the name of king, which fell into chaos when that name was withdrawn. It was imperative that someone should be crowned at Scone at once. And so, when Edward, by virtue of his authority as Over-Lord, gave judgment in favor of John Baliol, without a single remonstrance Baliol was crowned John I. at Scone, rendered homage to his feudal lord, and Scotland was a va.s.sal kingdom (1292). This whole proceeding, thus disposing of the state, had in no way recognized the existence of a nation. {260} It was an arrangement between the Scottish n.o.bles and clergy, and the King of England. When the heralds had, with great ceremony, proclaimed King Edward Lord Paramount of Scotland, the matter was supposed to be ended, and it was forgotten that there was beyond the Grampians a proud people, whose will would have to be broken before their country would become the _fief_ of an English king. But Baliol soon discovered how empty was the honor he had purchased. There was now a right of appeal from the Scottish Parliament and courts to those of Edward I. Such appeals were made, and King John I. was with scant ceremony summoned to London to plead his own cause before a Parliament which humiliated and insulted him.

In 1295, so intolerable had his position become, that Baliol threw off the yoke of va.s.salage, secured an alliance with France, and gathered such of his n.o.bles as he could about him, prepared to resist the authority of Edward; whereupon that enraged King marched into the rebellious land, swept victoriously from one city to another, gathering up towns and castles by the way; then took the {261} sacred Stone of Destiny from Scone as a memorial of his conquest, and left the penitent va.s.sal King helpless and forlorn in his humiliated kingdom. It was then that the famous stone was built into the coronation-chair, where it still remains.

We have now come to a name which, as Wordsworth says, is "to be found like a wild flower, all over his dear country." Everywhere there are places sacred to his memory. The story of Wallace is a brief one--an impa.s.sioned resolve to free his enslaved country, one supreme triumph, then defeat, an ignominious and cruel death in London, to be followed by imperishable renown for himself, and for Scotland--freedom. Sir William Wallace belonged to the lower cla.s.s of Scotch n.o.bility. He had never sworn allegiance to Edward I. His career of outlawry commenced by his making small attacks upon small English posts. As his successes increased, so did his followers, until so formidable had the movement become, that Edward learned there was a rising in his va.s.sal kingdom.

But it could not be much, he thought, as he had all the n.o.bles, and how could there be a rising {262} without n.o.bles? So he despatched a small force to straighten things out. But a few weeks later, Edward himself was in Scotland with an army. Wallace was besieging the Castle of Dundee, when he heard that the King was marching on Stirling. With the quick instinct of the true military leader, he saw his opportunity. He reached the rising ground commanding the bridge of Stirling, while the English army of 50,000 were still on the opposite side of the river.

When the English general, seeing his disadvantage, offered to make terms, Wallace replied that his terms were "the freedom of Scotland."

The attack made as they were crossing the bridge resulted in the panic of the English and a rout in which the greater part of the fleeing army was slain and drowned (1297). Baliol had been swept from the scene and was in the Tower of London, so Wallace was supreme. But in less than a year Edward had returned with an army overwhelming in numbers, and Wallace met a crus.h.i.+ng defeat at Falkirk. We next hear of him on the Continent, still planning for Scotland's liberation, then hunted and finally caught in Glasgow, dragged to London in chains, {263} there to be tried and condemned for treason. Had they condemned him as a rebel and an outlaw there would have been justice, for these he was. But a traitor he never was, for he had never sworn allegiance to Edward. He had fought against the invaders of his country, and for this he died a felon's death, with all the added cruelties of Norman law. He was first tortured, then executed in a way to strike terror to the souls of similar offenders (1304). But his work was accomplished. He had lighted the fires of patriotism in Scotland. The power of his name to stir the hearts of his people like a trumpet-blast, is best described by the words of Robert Burns: "The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut, in eternal rest." To be praised by the bards was the supreme reward of Celtic heroes. What did death matter, in form however terrible, to one who was to be so remembered nearly five centuries later by Scotland's greatest bard?

We are accustomed to regard the name of Bruce as the intensest expression of a Scottish nationality, and of its aspirations {264} toward liberty. But it had no such meaning at this time. The ancestor of the family was Robert de Bruis, a Norman knight who came over with the Conqueror. His son, Robert, was one of those hated foreign adventurers at the Court of David I., and received from that King a large grant and the Lords.h.i.+p of Annandale. The grandson of this first Earl of Annandale married Isabel, the granddaughter of David I., and so it was that the house of Bruce came into the line of royal succession.

It was Robert, the son of Isabel, who competed with Baliol for the throne of Scotland.

Robert Bruce, who stands forth as the greatest character in Scottish history, was twelve years old when his grandfather was defeated by Baliol in this compet.i.tion. No family in the va.s.sal kingdom was more trusted by England's King, nor more friendly to his pretensions. The young Robert's father had accompanied King Edward to Palestine in his own youth, and he himself was being trained at the English Court. His English mother had large estates in England, and, in fact there was everything to bind him to the King's cause. He and his father, {265} and the High Steward of Scotland, together with other Scottish-Norman n.o.bles, had been with the King in his triumphal march through Scotland when Baliol was dethroned, and at the time of the rising under Wallace, Robert Bruce had not one thing in common with him or his cause. And as for the people in the Highlands, if he ever thought of them at all, it was as troublesome malcontents, who needed to be ruled with a strong hand. Wallace was in rebellion against an established authority, to which all his own antecedents reconciled him. How the change was wrought, how his bold and ardent spirit came to its final resolve, we can only surmise. Was it through a complicated struggle of forces, in which ambition played the greatest part? Or did the splendid heroism of Wallace, and the spirit it evoked in the people, awaken a slumbering patriotism in his own romantic soul? Or was it the prescience of a leader and statesman, who saw in this newly developed popular force an opportunity for a double triumph, the emanc.i.p.ation of Scotland, and the realization of his own kings.h.i.+p?

Whatever the process, a change was going {266} on in his soul. He wavered, sometimes inclining to the party of Wallace, and sometimes to that of the King, until the year 1304. In that year, the very one in which Wallace died, he made a secret compact with the Bishop of Lamberton, pledging mutual help against any opponents. While at the Court of Edward, shortly after this, he discovered that the King had learned of this compromising paper. There was nothing left but flight.

He mounted his horse and swiftly returned to Scotland. Now the die was cast. His only compet.i.tor for the throne was Comyn. They met to confer over some plan of combination, and in a dispute which arose, Bruce slew his rival. Whether it was premeditated, or in the heat of pa.s.sion, who could say? But Comyn was the one obstacle to his purpose, and he had slain him, had slain the highest n.o.ble in the state! All of England, and now much of Scotland, would be against him; but he could not go back. He resolved upon a bold course. He went immediately to Scone, ascended the throne, and surrounded by a small band of followers, was crowned King of Scotland, March 27, 1306. He soon learned {267} the desperate nature of the enterprise upon which he had embarked. There was nothing in his past to inspire the confidence of the patriots at the North, and at the South he was pursued with vindictive fury by the friends of the slain Comyn. Edward, stirred as never before, was preparing for an invasion, issuing proclamations; no mercy to be shown to the rebels. Bruce's English estates, inherited from his mother, were confiscated, and an outlaw and a fugitive, he was excommunicated by the Pope! Unable to meet the forces sent by Edward, he placed his Queen in the care of a relative and then disappeared, wandering in the Highlands, hiding for one whole winter on the coast of Ireland and supposed to be dead. His Queen and her ladies were torn from their refuge and his cousin hanged.

Had Robert Bruce died at this time he would have been remembered not as a patriot, but as an ambitious n.o.ble who perished in a desperate attempt to make himself king. But his undaunted soul was working out a different ending to the story. In the spring of 1307 he returned undismayed. With a small band of followers he met an English {268} army, defeated the Earl of Pembroke at Ayr, and with this success the tide turned. The people caught the contagion of his intrepid spirit, and in the seven years which followed, he s.h.i.+nes out as one of the great captains of history. By the year 1313 every castle save Berwick and Stirling had surrendered to him. Vast preparations were made in England for the defence of this latter stronghold.

It was on the burn (stream) two miles from Stirling that Bruce a.s.sembled his 30,000 men, and made his plans to meet Edward with his 100,000. On the morning of the 23d of June, 1314, he exhorted his Scots to fight for their liberty. How they did it, the world will never forget! And while Scotland endures, and as long as there are Scotsmen with warm blood coursing in their veins, they will never cease to exult at the name Bannockburn! Thirty thousand English fell upon the field. Twenty-seven barons and two hundred knights, and seven hundred squires were lying in the dust, and twenty-two barons and sixty knights were prisoners. Never was there a more crus.h.i.+ng defeat.

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Still England refused to acknowledge the independence of the kingdom, and Bruce crossed the border with his army. The Pope was appealed to by Edward, and issued a pacifying bull in 1317, addressed to "Edward, King of England," and "the n.o.ble Robert de Bruis, conducting himself as King of Scotland." Bruce declined to accept it until he was addressed as King of Scotland, and then proceeded to capture Berwick. The Scottish Parliament sent an address to the Pope, from which a few interesting extracts are here made:

"It has pleased G.o.d to restore us to liberty, by one most valiant Prince and King, Lord Robert, who has undergone all manner of toil, fatigue, hards.h.i.+p, and hazard. To him we are resolved to adhere in all things, both on account of his merit, and for what he has done for us.

But, if this Prince should leave those principles he has so n.o.bly pursued, and consent that we be subjected to the King of England, we will immediately expel him as our enemy, and will choose another king, for as long as one hundred of us remain alive, we will never be subject to the English. For it is not glory, nor riches, {270} nor honor, but it is liberty alone, that we contend for, which no honest man will lose but with his life."

The spirit manifested in this had its effect, and the Pope consented to address Bruce by his t.i.tle, "King of Scotland." After delaying the evil day as long as possible, England at last, in 1328, concluded a treaty recognizing Scotland as an independent kingdom, in which occurred these words: "And we renounce whatever claims we or our ancestors in bygone times have laid in any way over the kingdom of Scotland."

Concerning the character of Robert Bruce, historians are not agreed.

To fathom his motives would have been difficult at the time; how much more so then after six centuries. We only know that he leaped into an arena from which nature and circ.u.mstances widely separated him, gave a free Scotland to her people, and made himself the hero of her great epic.

When we see the spiritless sons of Bruce in the hands of base intriguing n.o.bles, trailing their great inheritance in the mire, we exclaim: Was it for this that there was such magnificent heroism? Was it worth seven {271} years of such struggle to emanc.i.p.ate the land from a foreign tyranny, only to have it fall into a degrading domestic one?

But the rea.s.suring fact is, that the governing power of a nation is only an incident, more or less imperfect. The life is in the people.

There was not a cottage nor a cabin in all of Scotland that was not enn.o.bled by the consciousness of what had been done. Men's hearts were glad with a wholesome gladness; and every child in the land was lisping the names of Wallace and of Bruce and learning the story of their deeds. But for all that, the period following the death of the great King and Captain is a disappointing one, and we are not tempted to linger while the incapable David II. wears his father's crown, and while the son of Baliol, instigated by England, is troubling the kingdom, and even having himself crowned at Scone; and while Edward III., until attracted by more tempting fields in France, is invading the land and recapturing its strongholds. The limit of humiliation seems to be reached when David II., in the absence of an heir, proposes to leave his throne to Lionel, son of Edward III.!

When Robert Bruce bestowed his {272} daughter, Marjory, upon the High Steward of Scotland, he determined the course of history in two countries; in England even more than in Scotland. The office of Steward was the highest in the realm. Since the time of David I. it had been hereditary in one family, and according to a prevailing custom, to which many names now bear testimony, the official designation had become the family name. The marriage of Robert Stewart (seventh High Steward of his house) to Marjory Bruce was destined to bear consequences involving not alone the fate of Scotland, but leading to a transforming revolution and the greatest crisis in the life of England. As the Weird Sisters promised to Banquo, this Stewart was "to be the fader of mony Kingis," for Marjory was the ancestress of fourteen sovereigns, eight of whom were to sit upon the throne of Scotland, and six upon those of both England and Scotland (1371 to 1714, three hundred and forty-three years).

Marjory's son, Robert II., the first of the Stuart kings, was crowned at Scone in 1371. His natural weakness of character made him the mere creature of his determined and {273} ambitious brother, the Duke of Albany, who, in fact, held the state in his hand until far into the succeeding reign of Robert III., which commenced in 1390. The n.o.bles had now established a ruinous ascendancy in the state, and so abject had the King become, that Robert III. was paying annual grants to the Duke of Albany and others for his safety and that of his heir. In spite of this, his eldest son, Rothesay, was abducted by Albany and the Earl of Douglas, and mysteriously died, it is said of starvation. The unhappy King then sent Prince James, his second son, to France for safety; but he was captured by an English s.h.i.+p by the way, and lodged in the Tower of London by Henry IV. When Robert III. died immediately after of a broken heart, the captive Prince was proclaimed king (1406), and his uncle, the Duke of Albany, the next in royal succession, ruled the kingdom in name, as he had for many years in fact.

There existed between France and Scotland that sure bond of friends.h.i.+p between nations--a common hatred. This had given birth to a political alliance which was to be a thorn in the side of England for many {274} years. French soldiers and French gold strengthened Scotland in her chronic war with England, and in return the Scots sent their soldiers to the aid of the Dauphin of France. It was this which gave such value to the royal prisoner. He could be used by Henry IV. to restrain the French alliance, and also to keep in check the ambitious Duke of Albany, by the fact that he could in an hour reduce him to insignificance by restoring James to his throne.

Such were some of the influences at work during the eighteen years while the Scottish Prince with keen intelligence was drinking in the best culture of his age, and at the same time studying the superior civilization and government of the land of his captivity. He seems to have studied also to some effect the affairs of his own kingdom. He was released in 1424, crowned at Scone, and a new epoch commenced. He had resolved to break the power of the n.o.bles, and with extraordinary energy he set about his task! There was a long and unsettled account with his own relatives. He knew well who had humiliated and broken his father's heart, and starved to death his brother Rothesay, {275} and, as he believed, had also conspired with Henry IV. for his own capture and eighteen years' captivity. The old conspirator who had been the chief author of these things had recently died, but his son wore his t.i.tle. So the Duke of Albany (the King's cousin) and a few of the most conspicuous of the conspirators were seized, tried, and one after another five of the King's kindred died by the axe, in front of Stirling Castle. It was one of those outbursts of wrath after a long period of wrongdoing, terrible but wholesome. An unscrupulous n.o.bility had wrenched the power from the Crown, and it must be restored, or the kingdom would perish. This disease, common to European monarchies, could only be cured by just such a drastic remedy; successfully tried later in France, by Louis XI. (fifteenth century), by Ivan the Terrible in Russia (sixteenth century), and by slower methods accomplished in England, commencing with William the Conqueror, and completed when great n.o.bles were cringing at the feet of Henry VIII. There are times when a tyrant is a benefactor. And when a centralized, or even a despotic, monarchy {276} supplants an oligarchy, it is a long step in progress.

This ablest of the Stuart kings was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1437 by the enemies he had shorn of power, his own kindred removing the bolts to admit his murderers. He was the only sovereign of the Stuart line who inherited the heroic qualities of his great ancestor Robert Bruce, a line which almost fatally entangled England, and sprinkled the pages of history with tragedies, four out of the fourteen dying violent deaths, two of broken hearts, while two others were beheaded.

It is a temptation to linger for a moment over the personal traits of James I. We shall not find again among Scottish kings one who is possessed of "every manly accomplishment," one who plays upon the organ, the flute, the psaltery, and upon the harp "like another Orpheus," who draws and paints, is a poet, and what all the world loves--a lover. It was his pure, tender, romantic pa.s.sion for Lady Jane Beaufort, whom he married, just before his return to his kingdom, which inspired his poem, "The Kingis Qahaiir" (the King's book), a work {277} never approached by any other poet-king, and which marked a new epoch in the history of Scottish poetry. It is the story of his life and his love--a fantastic mingling of fact and allegory after the fas.h.i.+on of Chaucer and other mediaeval writers. It is pleasant to fancy that a sympathetic friends.h.i.+p may have existed between the unfortunate youth and the warm-hearted, impulsive Prince Hal, who, immediately upon his accession as Henry V., had James transferred from the Tower to Windsor. There it was he spent the last ten years of his captivity, there he met Lady Jane Beaufort, and wrote a great part of his poem.

The turbulence which had been checked by the splendid energy of James I., revived with increased fury after his death. The fifty years in which James II. and James III. reigned, but did not govern, is a meaningless period, over which it would be folly to linger. If it had any purpose it was to show how utterly base an unpatriotic feudalism could become--Douglases, Crawfords, Livingstons, Crichtons, Boyds, like ravening beasts of prey tearing each other to pieces, and trying to outwit by perfidy when {278} force failed; Livingstons holding the infant King, James II., a prisoner in Stirling Castle, of which they were hereditary governors, and together with the Crichtons entrapping the young Earl of Douglas and his brother by an invitation to dine, and then beheading them both--so that it is with satisfaction we learn of the King's reaching his majority and beheading a half-score of Livingstons at Edinburgh Castle! Then to the Douglases is traced every disorder in the realm, and with relief we hear of their disgrace and banishment, only to have the Boyds come upon the scene with a villanous conspiracy to seize the young King, James III., they, after rising to power, swiftly and tragically to fall again. History could not afford a more shameful and senseless display of depravity than in these human vultures. A Scottish writer says: "There was nothing but slaughter in this realm, every party lying in wait for another, as they had been setting tinchills (snares) for wild beasts."

In viewing this raging storm of anarchy one wonders what had become of the people. We hear nothing of them. They had no political influence, and if they had {279} representatives in Parliament, they were dumb, for the voice of the Commons was never heard. But there is reason to believe that, in spite of the ferocious feudal and social anarchy, the urban population and the peasantry were groping their way into a higher civilization. That better ways of living prevailed we may infer from sumptuary laws enacted by James III., and in the founding of three universities (St. Andrew's, 1411, Glasgow, 1450, and Aberdeen, 1494) there is sure indication that beneath the turbid political surface there flowed a stream of intellectual life. From these literary centres "learned Scotsmen" began to swarm over the land, and a solid scholars.h.i.+p was the aim of ambitious youths, who found in that the road to posts of distinction once won only by arms. There was a small body of national literature. Barbour's poem, "The Brus," led the way in the fourteenth century, then King James's poem in the fifteenth, then Henryson and Boece, and the procession of splendid names had commenced which was to be joined in later ages by Burns, Scott, and Carlyle.

England had now become the refuge for {280} disgraced and intriguing n.o.bles. The Duke of Albany, the Earl of Douglas, and others entered into negotiations with the English King, offering to acknowledge his feudal superiority, he in return promising to give the crown of Scotland to Albany. A battle between the English and Scottish forces took place in the vicinity of Stirling. During the engagement King James was thrown from his horse and then slain by his miscreant n.o.bles (1488). The scheme was a failure, and the son of the murdered King was at once crowned James IV. Henry VII., now King of England, conceived a plan of cementing friendly relations between the two kingdoms by the marriage of his daughter, Princess Margaret, with the young King. This union, so fruitful in consequences, took place at Holyrood in 1502, amid great rejoicings.

During the two preceding reigns the relations of Scotland with her great neighbor were comparatively peaceful. But in 1509 Queen Margaret's brother, Henry VIII., was crowned King of England. Family ties sat very lightly upon this monarch, and his hostile purposes soon became apparent, and {281} the friendly relations were broken. A war between France and England was the signal for a renewal of the old alliance between the French and the Scots. James himself led an army against that of his brother-in-law across the Tweed, and at Flodden met an overwhelming defeat and his own death (1513).

Europe was now unconsciously on the brink of a moral and spiritual revolution, a revolution which was going to affect no country more profoundly than Scotland. The Church of Rome, deeply embedded and wrought into the very structure of every European nation, seemed like a part of nature. As soon would men have expected to see the foundations of the continent removed, and yet there was a little rivulet of thought coursing through the brain of an obscure monk in Germany which was going to undermine and overthrow it, and cause a new Christendom to arise upon its ruins. And strangely, too, as if by pre-arrangement, that wonderful new device--the printing press--stood ready, waiting to disseminate the propaganda of a Reformed Church!

But kings and n.o.bles went on as before {282} with their absorbing game.

The infant James V. was proclaimed king. The conditions which had disgraced the minority of his predecessors were repeated, and until he was eighteen he was virtually a prisoner; then with relentless severity he turned upon the traitors. The Reformation which was a.s.suming great proportions was beginning to creep into Scotland. The Catholic King, with a double intent, placed Primates of the Church in all the great offices, and the excluded n.o.bles began to lean toward the new faith.

Luther's works were prohibited and stringent measures adopted to drive heretical literature out of the land. When, for reasons we all know, Henry VIII. became an ill.u.s.trious convert to Protestantism, he tried to bring about a marriage between his nephew, James, and his young daughter, Princess Mary; at the same time urging his nephew to join him in throwing off the authority of the Pope. But James made a choice pregnant with consequences for England. He married, in 1538, Mary, daughter of the great Duke of Guise in France; thus rejecting the peaceful overtures of his uncle, Henry VIII., and confirming the French alliance and {283} the anti-Protestant policy of his kingdom. Henry was displeased, and commenced an exasperating course toward Scotland.

There was a small engagement with the English at Solway Moss, which ended in a panic and defeat of the Scots. This so preyed upon the mind of the King that his spirit seemed broken. The news of the birth of a daughter--Mary Stuart--came to him simultaneously with that of the defeat. He was full of vague, tragic forebodings, sank into a melancholy, and expired a week later (1542). The little Queen Mary at once became the centre of state intrigues. Henry VIII. secured the co-operation of disaffected Scotch n.o.bles in a plan to place her in his hands as the betrothed of his son, Prince Edward. A treaty of alliance was drawn and signed, agreeing to the marriage, with the usual condition of the feudal lords.h.i.+p of the English King over Scotland.

The Scottish Parliament, through the efforts of Cardinal Beaton, rejected the proposal, and the furious Henry declared war, with instructions to sack, burn, and put to death without mercy, Cardinal Beaton's destruction being especially enjoined. The Cardinal, in the {284} meantime, was trying to stamp out the Reform-fires which were spreading with extraordinary swiftness. There were executions and banishments. Wishart, the Reformer and friend of John Knox, was burned at the stake. Following this there was a conspiracy for the death of the Cardinal, who was a.s.sa.s.sinated, and his Castle of St. Andrew became the stronghold of the conspirators. John Knox, for his own safety, took refuge with them, and upon the surrender of the castle to a French force, Knox was sent a prisoner to the French galleys.

The infant Queen, now six years old, was betrothed to the grandson of Francis I. and conveyed by Lord Livingston to France for safe-keeping until her marriage. Her mother, Mary of Guise, was Regent of Scotland, and doing her best to stem the tide of Protestantism. The spread of the Reformed faith was amazing. It took on at first a form more ethical than doctrinal. It was against the immoralities of the clergy that a sternly moral people rose in its wrath, and, on the other hand, it was the reading of the Scriptures, and interpreting them without authority, for which men were condemned to the {285} stake, their accusers saying, "What shall we leave to the bishops to do, when every man shall be a babbler about the Bible?" Carlyle says the Reformation gave to Scotland a soul. But it might have fared differently had not a co-operating destiny at the same time given Scotland a John Knox! Knox was to the Reformed Church in Scotland what the body of the tree is to its branches. He not only poured his own uncompromising life into the branches, but then determined the direction in which they should inflexibly grow. Knox had been the friend and disciple of Calvin in Geneva. The newly awakened soul in Scotland fed upon the theology of that great logician as the bread of heaven, and Calvinism was forever rooted in the hearts and minds of the people.

The marriage of Queen Mary with the Dauphin had been quickly followed by the death of Henry II., and her young consort was King of France.

Queen Elizabeth, in response to an appeal from the Reformed Church, sent a fleet and soldiers to meet the powerful French force which would now surely come. But the reign of Francis {286} II. was brief. In 1560 tidings came that he was dead. Mary now resolved to return to her own kingdom. Elizabeth tried to intercept her by the way, but she arrived safely and was warmly welcomed. She was nineteen, beautiful, gifted, rarely accomplished, had been trained in the most brilliant and gayest capital in Europe, and was a fervent Catholic. She came back to a land which had by Act of Parliament prohibited the Ma.s.s and adopted a religious faith she considered heretical, and a land where Protestantism in its austerest form had become rooted, and where John Knox, its sternest exponent, held the conscience of the people in his keeping. What to her were only simple pleasures, were to them deadly sins. When the Ma.s.s was celebrated after her return, so intense was the excitement, the chapel-door had to be guarded, and Knox proclaimed from the pulpit, that "an army of 10,000 enemies would have been less fearful to him" than this act of the Queen.

During the winter in Edinburgh the gayeties gave fresh offence. Knox declared that "the Queen had danced excessively till after midnight."

And then he preached a sermon {287} on the "Vices of Princes," which was an open attack upon her uncles, the Guises in France. Mary sent for the preacher, and reproved him for disrespect in trying to make her an object of contempt and hatred to her people, adding, "I know that my uncles and ye are not of one religion, and therefore I do not blame you, albeit you have no good opinion of them." The General a.s.sembly pa.s.sed resolutions recommending that it be enacted by Parliament that "all papistical idolatry should be suppressed in the realm, not alone among the subjects, but in the Queen's own person." Mary, with her accustomed tact, replied, that she "was not yet persuaded in the Protestant religion, nor of the impiety in the Ma.s.s. But although she would not leave the religion wherein she had been nourished and brought up, neither would she press the conscience of any, and, on their part, they should not press her conscience."

We cannot wonder that Mary was revolted by the harshness of John Knox; nor can we wonder that he was alarmed. A fascinating queen, with a rare talent for diplomacy, and in personal touch with all the Catholic centres in Europe, was a {288} formidable menace to the Reformed Church in Scotland, and would in all probability have temporarily overthrown it, had not the course of events been unexpectedly arrested. Every Court in Europe was scheming for Mary's marriage. Proposals from Spain, France, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, and the Earl of Leicester in England were all considered. Mary's preference was for Don Carlos of Spain; but when this proved impossible, she made, suddenly, an unfortunate choice. Henry Stewart, who was Lord Darnley, the son of the Earl of Lennox, was, like herself, the great grandchild of Henry VII. That was a great point in eligibility, but the only one. He was a Catholic, three years younger than herself, good-looking, weak and vicious. The marriage was celebrated at Holyrood in 1565, and Mary bestowed upon her consort the t.i.tle of king. This did not satisfy him.

He demanded that the crown should be secured to him for life; and that if Mary died childless, his heirs should succeed. With such violence and insolence did Darnley press these demands, and so open were his debaucheries, that Mary was revolted and disgusted. Her chief {289} minister was an Italian named Rizzio, a man of insignificant, mean exterior, but astute and accomplished. There seems no reason to believe that Darnley was ever jealous of the Italian, but he believed that he was an obstacle to his ambitious designs and was using his influence with Mary to defeat them. He determined to remove him.

While Rizzio and the Queen were in conversation in her cabinet, Darnley entered, seized and held Mary in his grasp, while his a.s.sa.s.sins dragged Rizzio into an adjoining room and stabbed him to death. Who can wonder that she left him, saying, "I shall be your wife no longer!" But after the birth of her infant, three months later, her feelings seem to have softened, and it looked like heroic devotion when she went to his bedside while he was recovering from small-pox, and had him tenderly removed to a house near Edinburgh, where she could visit him daily.

It will never be known whether Mary was cognizant of or, even worse, accessory to Darnley's murder, which occurred at midnight a few hours after she had left him, February 9, 1567.

{290}

Suspicion pointed at once to the Earl of Bothwell. The Court acquitted him, but public opinion did not. And it was Mary's marriage with this man which was her undoing. Innocent or guilty, the world will never forgive her for having married, three months after her husband's death, the man believed to be his murderer! Even her friends deserted her. A prisoner at Lochleven Castle, she was compelled to sign an act of abdication in favor of her son. A few of the Queen's adherents, the Hamiltons, Argyles, Setons, Livingstons, Flemings, and others gathered a small army in her support and aided her escape, which was quickly followed by a defeat in an engagement near Glasgow. Mary then resolved upon the step which led her by a long, dark, and dreary pathway to the scaffold. She crossed into England and threw herself upon the mercy of her cousin, Elizabeth.

Immediately upon the Queen's abdication her son, thirteen months old, was crowned James VI. of Scotland. There was a powerful minority which disapproved of all these proceedings; so now there was a Queen's party, a King's party, the latter, under the {291} regency of Moray, having the support of the Reformed clergy. These conditions promised a bitter and prolonged contest, which promise was fully realized; and not until 1573 was the party of the Queen subdued. During the minority of the King a new element had entered into the conflict. The Reformation in Scotland had, as we have seen, under the vigorous leaders.h.i.+p of John Knox, a.s.sumed the Calvinistic type. In England, during the reign of Elizabeth, a more modified form had been adopted--an episcopacy, with a house of bishops, a liturgy, and a ritual. To the Scotch Reformers this was a compromise with the Church of Rome, no less abhorrent to them than papacy. The struggle resolved itself into one between the advocates of these rival forms of Protestantism, each striving to obtain ascendancy in the kingdom, and control of the King. Some of the most moderate of the Protestants approved of restoring the ecclesiastical estate which had disappeared from Parliament with the Reformation, and having a body of Protestant clergy to sit with the Lords and Commons. These questions, of such vital moment to the consciences of many, were to others merely a cloak for {292} personal ambitions and political intrigues. When James was seventeen years old, the method already so familiar in Scotland, was resorted to. In order to separate him from one set of villanous plotters, he was entrapped by another by an invitation to visit Ruthven Castle, where he found himself a prisoner, and when the plot failed, the Reformed clergy did its best to s.h.i.+eld the perpetrators, who had acted with their knowledge and consent.

But James had already made his choice between the two forms of Protestantism, and the basis of his choice was the sacredness of the royal prerogative. A theology which conflicted with that, was not the one for his kingdom. He would have no religion in which presbyters and synods and laymen were a.s.serting authority. The King, G.o.d's anointed, was the natural head of the Church, and should determine its policy.

Such was the theory which even at this early time had become firmly lodged in the acute and narrow mind of the precocious youth, and which throughout his entire reign was the inspiration of his policy. In the proceedings following the "Ruthven Raid," as it is {293} called, he openly manifested his determination to introduce episcopacy into his kingdom.

So the conflict was now between the clergy and the Crown. The latter gained the first victory. Parliament, in 1584, affirmed the supreme authority of the King in all matters civil and religious. The act placed unprecedented powers in his hands, saying, "These powers by the gift of Heaven belong to his Majesty and to his successors." And so it was that in 1584 the current started which, after running its ruinous course, was to terminate in 1649 in the tragedy at Whitehall. There was a reaction from the first triumph of divine right, and in 1592 the Act of Royal Supremacy was repealed, and the General a.s.sembly succeeded in obtaining parliamentary sanction for the authority of the presbytery.